Why teachers should annotate?

Jennifer Yien
January 27, 2018 15:40

Sharing Annotations

At Newsela, we love talking to teachers and hearing how our articles inspire and engage students. Sometimes, teachers rave about Write and the percentile calculation, but most recently, we’ve been hearing a lot about annotations. Newsela teachers have been finding success in sharing annotations with their students.

We already know that annotations are a great way to measure student engagement within an article and that annotations lead to increased student success (see this article on how annotating quiz questions bolsters student performance). Still, we wondered: when teachers share annotations with their students, does it make the student more likely to annotate?

To answer this question, we looked at over 21,000 annotations from teachers. As shown below, we saw that teachers use annotations in many different ways -- some like to ask their students questions, while others like to help define words, or assess comprehension.

Annotations where teachers ask questions to students

Annotations where teachers help with vocabulary understanding

Annotations where teachers assess sectional comprehension

Impact of Sharing Annotations

Then we looked at over 125,000 student annotations which corresponded to the annotating teachers. The evidence was clear. It does matter when a teacher shares annotations with a student. In fact,

Students are more than five times more likely to annotate if their teacher annotates

Why More Likely to Annotate?

So we know students are more than five times more likely to annotate an article when their teacher their annotations. That leads to a second question: what is prompting the student to annotate more?

To answer this, we wanted to see if:

students were responding to annotations and/or

students were annotating articles that were assigned by their teachers.

It’s no coincidence that 73% of the 142,000 student annotations have either one or both of these properties. Their annotations are either responding to teacher’s annotations and/or part of completing their article assignment.

Student Annotations Associated with Teacher Annotations

So how do we get students to annotate more?

Teachers can help their students get into the habit of annotating by making it a routine any time students read a Newsela article. Annotating helps students read actively and monitor their own comprehension as they read. There are a variety of ways that you can get your students hooked on annotating Newsela articles, as explained in this article.

While we’ve done our annotation homework, there could certainly be other reasons why students are 5 times more likely to annotate when their teachers do. Teachers, tweet us @Newsela and use the hashtag #HowINewsela to let us know what else is compelling your students to annotate articles.